In Order to Build the Right Product

ENGINEERS NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT’S BEHIND THE BUSINESS

This is why all our employees not only know how to code, but also how to build a business

RokkinCat started after the original partners shuttered our first attempt at a tech startup. We were accepted into the 94Labs business incubator (this has since turned into Gener8tor). By the time we had finished in the incubator, we had realized that what we really loved was building the product. We saw that the 13 other companies in our class had not finished much of their products because they were having trouble finding programmers. RokkinCat was created to fill that gap, to be engineers that have enough business experience to be effective technology partners.

By working with early stage startups, we honed our business skills; helping founders with their minimum viable product and then executing the development on that product.

By building our own business — and constantly starting up new ones — we immerse ourselves in the kinds of business problems our clients are dealing with so we know first hand if and how technology can help solve them. We haven't hired any growth hackers, or business development experts, or account managers, because we believe that in order to get the product right, our engineers have to understand why the product is being built.

Our Team

meet the talent

Josh Holtz

Josh is one of the founding partners, and the first ever employee of RokkinCat. He is our resident iOS expert, having built production level applications in Objective-C, Swift, and Swift 2. He also is a core contributor to the Fastlane mobile build automation tool suite. Find him on GitHub or Twitter.

Nick Gartmann

Nick is one of the founding partners of RokkinCat. He helps perspective clients understand what the true technology needs are so they spend money on the right stuff . He also builds applications in as many technologies as possible so as to better understand the technology options availble to RokkinCat's clients. You can find him on GitHub, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Jason Stiebs

Jason is one of the founding partners of RokkinCat. All API development and server application projects go through him. As a core contributor of the Phoenix Web Framework and the creator of the Elixir implementation of JSONAPI, he has a lot of practice making sure applications built by RokkinCat are fast and reliable. Talk to him on GitHub and Twitter or any of the many IRC channels he hangs out in.

GREG BILLETDEAUX

Greg is in charge of all of RokkinCat's Android app development. Greg has been doing Android development since the very earliest releases of Android and developed one of the most popular sidebar navigation libraries for Android while he was still in school. He is also a coach of First Robotics team 930. Learn more about him on GitHub.

Mitch Henke

Mitch is one of RokkinCat's most methodical engineers. He works on the servers of our largest applications, making sure they are fast and resilient, and that they will stay that way no matter how many users get thrown at them. If you check out his GitHub you'll see a long list of repos that he has forked and fixed. Ask him about Postgres and Elasticsearch on Twitter.

LYZZI BROOKS

Lyzzi is the newest employee at RokkinCat. She is our resident video game designer and developer and has built many games using the Unity framework. As the former head of the MSOE Video Game Development Group, she has worked on teams to build a bunch of games (which you can find on her GitHub). She does NodeJS and iOS development in addition to her more fun capabilities. Head to Twitter to read her thoughts on programming, gaming, knitting, music, and the internet in general.

Jake Robers

Jake is a junior software engineer at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, and has been an intern at RokkinCat for two years. He has a great eye for product development, and has been focusing his study around AngularJS, Elixir, and machine learning. Jake has also taken a great interest in developer-focused UX, follow him on Twitter to hear him complain about bad frameworks, and check out his GitHub to watch him fix it.